‘Your shepherd’s pie. It’s amazing. Exquisite. You follow the instructions on that packet mix to the letter.’ Clementine put her arm around his waist.
And also this. She didn’t get this. How could they be teasing each other so fondly after all the tension at Erika’s place? Tension caused by Erika, but really, Clementine and Sam should have been on the same page about something as significant as whether or not they were going to have a third child. It should have been clarified, discussed. Clementine should not have been going around telling people she’d rather poke her eyes out so that people thought they could rely on that information, thank you very much.
Was all this lovable banter for the benefit of Vid and Tiffany? She and Oliver didn’t do married couple banter. Oliver spoke fondly but politely to Erika in public, as if she were a beloved aunt, perhaps, not his wife. People probably thought they had a terrible marriage.
‘Let me top you up there,’ said Tiffany to Erika, holding up the champagne bottle.
‘Oh, gosh, that went down fast.’ Erika looked at her empty glass, mystified.
‘I wonder if I should go and check on the kids,’ said Sam. He looked up at the ceiling. ‘It sounds suspiciously quiet up there.’
‘Ah, relax, don’t worry, they’re fine with Dakota,’ said Vid.
‘Sam is the worrier,’ said Clementine.
‘Yes, Clementine prefers the free-range parenting approach,’ said Sam. ‘No need to watch them at the shopping centre, a security guard will take care of them.’
‘Sam, that happened once,’ protested Clementine. ‘I turned my back on Holly for one second in JB Hi-Fi,’ she said to Vid and Tiffany, although Erika didn’t remember hearing this story before. ‘And she’d run off to find a Barbie DVD or something, and got disoriented and wandered out of the shop. It was terrifying.’
‘Yes, see, so that’s why you can’t turn your back,’ said Sam.
‘Yes, Mr Never-Made-a-Mistake-in-Your-Life.’ Clementine rolled her eyes.
‘Never made that sort of mistake,’ said Sam.
‘That’s nothing. I lost Dakota at the beach once,’ said Vid.
Erika and Oliver exchanged looks. Were these parents trying to outdo each other with just how incompetent and irresponsible they were? When Oliver and Erika had a child it would never be out of their sight. Never. They would risk-assess every situation. They would give their child all the attention they hadn’t got from their own parents. They would do everything right that their parents had got wrong.
‘I have never been so scared in my life as that day at the beach,’ said Tiffany. ‘I wanted to kill him. I thought to myself, if something has happened to Dakota, I will kill him, I will literally kill him, I will never forgive him.’
‘But look, I’m still alive! We found her. It all worked out fine,’ said Vid. ‘Kids get lost. It’s part of life.’
No it’s not, thought Erika.
‘Ah, no it’s not,’ said Tiffany, echoing Erika’s thoughts. ‘It’s not inevitable.’
‘Agreed.’ Sam clinked his beer bottle against Tiffany’s. ‘Jeez. These feckless partners of ours.’
‘You and me, we are the feckless ones,’ said Vid to Clementine, and he made ‘feckless’ sound like a delicious way to be.
‘We’re relaxed,’ said Clementine. ‘Anyway, it happened once and now I watch them like a hawk.’
‘What about you two, eh?’ said Vid to Erika and Oliver, perhaps noticing that his neighbours were being left out of the conversation.
‘I watch Erika like a hawk,’ said Oliver unexpectedly. ‘I haven’t lost her once.’
Everyone laughed and Oliver looked triumphant. He couldn’t normally pull off a clever comeback. Don’t ruin it, my love, thought Erika as she saw Oliver’s mouth move in preparation to speak again. Stop there. Don’t try to say the same thing again in a different way to get a bigger laugh.
‘But what about kids, eh?’ said Vid. ‘Are you two planning to have children?’
There was a brief pause. A tightening, a constriction of the atmosphere as if people had stopped breathing.
‘Vid,’ said Tiffany. ‘You can’t ask people that. It’s personal.’
‘What? Why not? What’s personal about children?’ Vid looked nonplussed.
‘We’re hoping to have children,’ said Oliver. His face collapsed inward, like a popped balloon. Poor Oliver. So soon after his tiny social triumph.
‘One day,’ said Erika. Everyone seemed to be deliberately not looking at her, the way people did when you had food in your teeth and they didn’t want to tell you so they kept trying not to see. She used her fingernail to check her teeth for sesame seeds from the crackers. She’d meant to sound up-beat and positive. ‘One day soon.’
‘Yes, but you can’t wait too long,’ said Vid.
‘For God’s sake, Vid!’ said Tiffany.
There was a piercing yell from upstairs.
chapter twenty-three
‘It’s Clementine.’
The rain was so loud right now Erika could only just distinguish Clementine’s voice on the phone.
‘Speak up,’ she said.